BARCELONA—The story of Jolla and its Sailfish OS is a rocky one. The company, founded in the wake of Nokia's MeeGo division being wound up, went public in 2012 with the intention of bringing its Linux-based Sailfish OS to manufacturers as an alternative to Google's Android.

Fast forward to 2015 and Jolla wasn't in a good place, with fundraising issues leading to the Jolla Tablet being cancelled and employees having to be let go.

In 2017, Jolla's now in a much healthier shape, announcing a string of partnerships and projects all around the world, including a plan to make a Sailfish variant for the Chinese market, for which it aims to raise $250 million, and a new deal with Sony, which will see users able to easily download and install Sailfish on Xperia devices.

At the moment, the only Sony Xperia phone running Sailfish OS is the Xperia X, but the idea is that users who want to run Sailfish on their phones instead of Android will be able to do so easily.

In the past it's been no trouble for those used to flashing ROMs to get Sailfish (or AOSP) up and running, but this may be a bit beyond your average phone user. Jolla and by extension Sony want to make this easy peasy for the sort of people tired of Google but unsure how to escape its grip.

PCMag got some hands-on time with the Sailfish-running Xperia X at Mobile World Congress and chatted to chief Sailfish designer Martin Schüle, who has been involved with the project since the MeeGo days.

The first thing you should know about how the Sailfish experience differs from Android is that it's built without any hard or soft keys in mind. The usual Android trio of back, home and menu are not here.

Everything instead is actioned by gestures; you can get an overview of what processes are running by swiping in from the left and right sides of the screen. Pulling up from the bottom reveals a familiar-looking app drawer from where you can launch apps. Long pressing on any app icons on the home screen will see X-shaped cancel icons blossoming into life, letting you quit any processes that are hogging your memory.

Certain apps like the clock benefit from a design quirk that Schüle calls the "pulley system." Dragging up or down on certain lists of menu commands elicits a soft haptic buzz when you confirm your selection. It's an interesting way of doing things, but we think it's only really limited to short lists of maybe two or three options; it might not be that practical to action commands from longer drop downs this way.

At first it's a little confusing figuring out how to get back to the main screen, but after a few minutes of swiping and swishing around, it became a bit more comfortable. Like anything, practice makes perfect and figuring out the Sailfish way of doing things shouldn't take too long.

Generally, everything felt very stable and slick, with the exception of the camera app, which Schüle said was a very early build and not representative of how things will be once a commercial version of Sailfish is ready to hit customers' phones.

The purpose of getting it up and running on an Xperia X was to be able to show the world that Sailfish is still here and will be available to Sony customers "soon."

Could we live with this instead of Android? Probably. You'll be able to sideload .apk files as well as install apps directly from a Sailfish app store, so in theory should be able to replicate the parts of the Android experience you want to keep relatively easily.

Related

The overarching theme of Jolla's presentation was privacy. Pavel Eyges, CEO of the Open Mobile Platform, spoke of the negative perception of Android in Russia, which, he said, mainly stems from "concern over backdoors and undocumented features" and a perception that Google is all-pervasive and knows too much about people's lives. Jolla announced a licensing agreement with the Russian government-backed Open Mobile Platform last December, which will see the Sailfish OS variant adopted by government agencies.

Jolla's also partnering with the Bolivia-based Jala Group, which wants to push the platform in order to, in the words of the press release "ensure technological independence for Latin America."

Whether this feeling extends to other parts of the world remains to be seen. For those elsewhere who want an alternative to Google's 'droid, now that Cyanogen's on the way out, this could be the open source OS you're looking for.

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